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Democracy Forward Foundation (DFF) is a center-left litigation and advocacy nonprofit created in early 2017 by high-level Democratic Party operatives. The organization has been aggressive in targeting the Trump administration.[1] Examples include an ethics complaint against the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, alleging she was illegally promoting her clothing apparel line by wearing its products at official government functions,[2] and a lawsuit claiming the Trump administration was violating the U.S. Constitution by cutting the Obamacare advertising budget and permitting the sale of additional health coverage plans.[3]

The DFF board is chaired by Marc Elias, general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and head of the political law practice at Perkins Coie that represents almost all of the nation’s most powerful Democratic Party and left-leaning political advocacy organizations.[4]Anne Harkavy, a legal counsel to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John Kerry, is the group’s executive director.[5] The rest of the DFF board and most of the other senior staffers have similar partisan work histories.[6]

Mainstream media accounts of DFF’s campaigns in publications such as Newsweek[7] , the Washington Post[8], and theChicago Sun-Times [9] frequently fail to note the ideological agenda of DFF, often neutrally identifying it as a nonprofit “watchdog” organization.

Democracy Forward

Democracy Forward (DF) is the 501(c)(4) advocacy affiliate of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Democracy Forward Foundation. The two organizations appear to share the same website, board and employees. As of late 2018 the DFF/DF website showed 27 employees, including a ten-lawyer legal team. [10]

Democracy Forward Foundation’s funding sources and budget information were not known as of December 2018.